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Three Ways Conservatives Can Move Forward After Last Week

1. Know Thine Enemy. The problem isn’t someone on Twitter who gloats about Obamacare and gay marriage and the triumph of left-liberalism. The problem isn’t even disgusting people who spit on a priest walking past the gay pride parade in Manhattan this weekend. The problem is governance by an unelected elite.

John Roberts ruled, effectively, that the IRS had the power to define Obamacare however it needed to in order for it to work. He is unelected, as are the IRS officials whom he so empowered (and the bureaucrats who will be empowered by this precedent in future cases). It was the notorious Jonathan Gruber of MIT whose imprudent public statements revealed Obamacare’s design was to force compliance at the state level and lie about it.

Similarly, in the case of gay marriage, a matter of cultural controversy was resolved, with the imperial words “it is so ordered,” by five unelected justices of the Supreme Court. The “right to gay marriage” has now become constitutional, something non-gay marriage never was. The change in prevailing views on gay marriage wasn’t happening quickly enough for the justices so they hastened it — in effect imposing a revolutionary change that could simply have been evolutionary if allowed to work its way over the next decade through an altered country.

I support gay marriage, but I don’t support this way of doing business. I support the death penalty, too, but that doesn’t mean I support posses stringing people up and hanging them. And even if I didn’t support gay marriage, I would find its legislative successes impossible to argue with, whereas Justice Kennedy’s ludicrously sentimental and lawless opinion can and will be argued over for decades.

2. Invoke basic American governing rules and the rule of law. What unites these policies, and certain strains of Obamaism, is the impatience with the democratic process and the rule of law. That was what liberated the president from the customary bounds of executive power when he announced he was imposing the rules of the Dream Act under the logic that because Congress wouldn’t make this law he so wanted he’d just make it himself. Conservatives can easily unite under the banner of the notion that we are a nation of laws and that we are being captained into lawless waters whose rocky shoals could entirely upend the ship of state.

3. The problem is Washington. What happened with the Confederate flag in South Carolina last week is a good example of how change can come about quickly and almost without controversy so long as Washington is not involved. When Washington gets involved, the battle lines harden, the money machines get cranking, and the system becomes sclerotic to benefit the players. Obamacare is a Washington tentacle. The Supreme Court’s imposition is a Washington tentacle. Keeping the focus on the Washington aspect of the problem is necessary to frame the difference between Right and Left.